What’s New

2/7/2018 v1055
Calvin: A bushel is a unit of weight equal to four pecks? What’s a peck?
Hobbes: A quick smooch.
Calvin: You know, I don’t understand math at all.
— Bill Watterson (b. 1958)

Internal reorganizations (more than a peck).

1/24/2018 v1052
A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it.
— Jean de La Fontaine (1621–1695)

One of this version’s changes is unmissable.

1/3/2018 v1049
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
— T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)

Champion stones now only require Channel Master.
Ranks in specific stones are translated behind the scenes to Channel Master ranks.
This means you no longer have to specialize in a couple stones,
and instead can use any of the 4 stones with the same efficiency.
The amount of bonus from channel master has also been tweaked slightly,
and the bonus from fell has been removed (but should be made up for for
most people by the removal of the need to specialize).
These numbers might change a bit more over the next few updates.

The Loremasters are beginning to step into the light.

12/6/2017 v1045
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
— Mark Twain (1835–1910)

Merry Bawkmas!

... and all other coincident holidays!

Certain items in a certain far-off mountain should be significantly more common.

Several monsters which had been inadvertently shaved have been reupholstered.

11/15/2017 v1042
But now the days grow short
I’m in the autumn of the year
And now I think of my life as vintage wine
From fine old kegs
From the brim to the dregs
And it poured sweet and clear
It was a very good year.
— Ervin Drake (1919–2015)

No significant changes this version.

No crashes in 1,693 days, and counting. (A record!)

Today marks the 1042nd week of the game’s existence, more or less.
This means that Clan Lord has been up and running, almost continuously,
for just over 20 years. Happy anniversary to us!

However... as you will have noticed, the Account Portal has been out of order
for some months now. Unfortunately, we’ve concluded that, for reasons of time
and resources, we are unable to revive it. This means it’s basically impossible
to sign up new players, or for existing ones to modify their accounts,
add new character slots, transfer characters, etc.

Moreover, we have to recognize the writing on the wall for our current
Mac and Windows client apps. Both are technologically out-of-date by decades,
not just years. We’ve nursed them along as much as we could, but without
drastic rewrites they’re not likely to survive more than, say, 12–18 months.

Even if we had the time, skill, and resources to rewrite the clients
(not to mention our associated internal world-building tools),
we’re still stuck with game assets — primarily artwork and sounds — that,
although they may have been acceptable or even ambitious back in the late 1990’s,
are nowadays woefully inadequate. They would all have to be redone, from scratch,
to look and work reasonably decently on modern hardware.

Finally, even the least observant of players will have noticed
that the pace of world enhancements has lately slowed to a trickle.
Many of the volunteer GMs and their helpers and the artists and contributors
who had put so much time and effort into the Clan Lord world
over these last 20 years or so, are now inactive.
Without their enthusiastic participation, the game world stagnates.

We have enormous gratitude to all our dedicated players and
wonderful collaborators. We’re interested in your thoughts;
we’ve started
a discussion on the Sentinel,
where together we can work out the future of Clan Lord.